ODF fillip

May 22, 2008

I’ve resisted getting drawn into the OOXML scrap over on PM-R’s blog; partly because I’ve had plenty to do, and mostly because I don’t think another partly informed opinion would add much to the debate.

Our approach to text mining is necessarily pragmatic, which changes your outlook significantly (for detailed reasons why, read Peter Sefton’s blog). OOXML may be a flawed spec born of a standardisation process that left its participants disenchanted and angry. It may be that OOXML can only ever be implemented meaningfully by Word. The fact remains that most chemists, most people, use Word to create documents.

Which is why the news that Office 2007 SP2 introduces native support for ODF natively is brightening my day.

ODF has a potential upside in expanding interoperability, but as always, business continuity requirements will have a significant effect on our approach to these file format changes.